landward side of the dunes this joins up to make a kind of 

 meadow about half a mile wide, which in turn merges into a 

 wide muddy beach that passes imperceptibly into the water of 

 the lagoon. On the seaward side of the sandspit there is a con- 

 tinuous clear beach about a hundred feet wide and perfectly 

 level. As you drive along it. however, you will come to regularly 

 alternating stretches of flat wet sand and slight ridges of soft 

 dry sand. Seen from the air, these give the whole ccist a banded 

 or striped appearance. The curious thing is that the dry strips 

 or spits have no connection with the spacing of the sand dunes 

 nor their orientation, but run directly at right angles to the 

 water's edge at every point, so that they may point anywhere 

 from northwest through east to south. 



The beach itself is a rather clean one but for the shells of a 

 number of mollusks and, twice a year, countless purplish blue 

 gas-filled bladders of that remarkable coelenterate related to the 

 jellyfishes and called the Portuguese Man-of-War (the reason 

 for the name being that the sails of the exploratory fleets of that 

 nation in the early days were often dyed bright blue-green). This 

 creature is not just one but a colony of animals, of very varied 

 shapes and sizes, each adapted for special purposes. The upper 

 part is a gelatinous bladder filled with gas, which rides above the 

 waves but which can be deflated so that the whole colony sinks 

 below. Underneath this are numerous appendages, including 

 whiplike structures that may trail as much as a hundred feet 

 down into the water. These creatures do not just drift with the 

 winds and the currents: they have been observed traveling 

 steadily across both at a fair angle. In the appendages live one 

 of the communal types of creature that make up the whole 

 complex. These have barbed whips that can be shot out at prey, 

 sting by penetration, and are for their size much more deadly 

 than most if not all snakes. There may be thousands in one 

 colony, so their concerted efforts can be deadly even to humans. 

 Their poison persists after death and even when the creature is 

 desiccated, so that one should be very cautious in handling those 

 stranded bladders to which the shriveled remnants of the jelly- 

 like appendages may be adhering. 



EMPIRE OF THE BIRDS 



If one sits quietly on the seaward beach of the great sandspit one 

 will have friends. There is not much variety of wildlife but for 

 herring gulls and the delightful laughing gulls — which do indeed 

 give vent to just about the whole gamut of noises made by 

 human beings when laughing. The former mostly stand or tramp 

 about the upper beach; the latter flap about over the shallows 

 inside the breakers. Then there are several species of terns that 

 come spiking by on the wind, peering ever downward and 

 occasionally plunging headlong into the surf. But, apart from 

 these, the only ever-present denizens of the beaches are the tiny 

 sanderlings, which rush endlessly and somewhat hysterically 

 back and forth at the very edge of every incoming and outgoing 

 surge of the spent waves on the wet sand. These are small, most 

 aggressive birds, with dull brownish gray coloration above, light 

 undersides, dark legs, and long beaks. Each maintains a private 

 territory at the water's edge and works it ceaselessly and 

 furiously, pecking at every tiny morsel the sea floods ashore — 

 mostly a small, flattened kind of crustacean called sand hoppers. 

 If one bird inadvertently runs into the territory of another it is 

 immediately attacked and run off by the owner. These little birds 

 run so fast they look like mechanical toys. 



The inner or landward slopes of the dunes are almost com- 

 pletely sterile, but as you descend onto the mud flats and 



approach the inner waterway, you enter a veritable empire of 

 the birds. The island-studded and protected shallow waters all 

 the way down this coast, and the marshes, vegetated dunes, wet 

 prairies, ponds, and creeks of the true coast for as far as they 

 extend inland, are crowded all year round with so many dif- 

 ferent kinds of birds in such enormous numbers that one 

 becomes almost glutted with the sight of them. Nor are these 

 all sea and wading birds, for the bushes, the sedges, the oak 

 trees, and the ponds, copses, and mesquites inland, are also 

 filled with the constant fluttering of millions of others. It has 

 always surprised me that one should have to visit a flat and in 

 many respects rather commonplace area of lowland in order to 

 see massed armies of so many totally different groups of bird 

 species assembled. This east coast of Texas is the only place on 

 this continent where you can see such a variety of species. To 

 corroborate this I may say that in the 1956 edition of a list of 

 the birds seen on this coast {Checklist of the Birds of the Central 

 Texas Coast, by Conger N. Hagar and Fred M. Packard) no less 

 than 460 assuredly determined and 24 unconfirmed species had 

 been identified. During a visit to Mrs. Hagar in 1959, I learned 

 that her list of positively identified species is now well past the 

 500 mark. 



There are two outstanding and interrelated aspects of this 

 bird land, the first a general one and the other of an individual 

 and almost personal nature. These are migration, and the bird 

 known as the Whooping Crane. 



THE PASSING OF THE GREAT 



These great birds with a wing span of seven feet, glistening 

 white except for jet-black wing tips and a red face, were never 

 numerous (because each pair needs about a square mile to main- 

 tain itself and its young), but they were once widespread from 

 the Arctic coast to central Mexico and from Utah to South Caro- 

 lina. By 1920 their range had been drastically reduced due to 

 the draining of marshes and the extension of agriculture, and 

 the total number of the birds had fallen to less than fifty. The 

 last nest was noted in Saskatchewan. Then began a campaign 

 that does much credit to the human race as a whole. All manner 

 of people banded together to try to save this bird from extinction. 

 This was hardly the first attempt to save a species of wild animal 

 (conservation was not altogether unknown even among the 

 ancients) but it was almost the first, if not the very first time 

 that the citizens of a nation combined officially to do such a 

 thing and used all the resources of modern publicity to get it 

 done. 



The first thing that was done was to take a census of the 

 remaining birds and confirm every possible detail of their habits 

 and life cycle. The latter was found to entail their migration 

 annually to the Arctic Circle in spring, starting about early May, 

 and back again to southern temperate latitudes in the fall, 

 arriving in late October — a distance of over two thousand miles. 

 The surviving birds all apparently wintered on one peninsula in 

 this province — the Aransas, in southeastern Texas. From here 

 they flew almost straight north over Oklahoma, Kansas. Ne- 

 braska, South and North Dakota, and Saskatchewan to the region 

 of the Great Slave Lake in the Mackenzie district of the Cana- 

 dian Northwest Territories. As a result of this, "refuges" were set 



The Gray Fox is very widely distributed today but seems 

 to be primarily a parkland and scrub-belt species. It is a 

 surprisingly good tree-climber. 



192 



